On a geological scale, I’m just a nanosecond. Smaller probably. By internet standards, I guess I’m an old man. For a while I was worried that I’d missed the boat. You know, came along too late. But as I look back, I’ve been on the internet for 14 years. Ever since I installed a Gopher client on my first 386 running Windows 3.0. I was there when Mosaic was a breakthrough for browsing the web–quickly replaced by Netscape.
Sure, I didn’t jump into website development right away, but by 1999 I was working on websites. If anyone remembers the first iteration of mp3.com, they got social networking back in 1998. I was in a band at the time and bands could link to “friends”. How colloquial that all seems.
By 2003, I’d built my own PHP-based blog CMS. By 2005 I was podcasting. In 2007 I got hooked on Twitter.
What’s next? There are a lot of folks out there trying to be the next big thing. Personally, I find it all quite inspiring. I think in the next few years, some standards will emerge and all of these tools will be available to us.
Imagine using Twitter for research. All your followers get an update from you and they simply report on back with a direct message “d @truetone I’m doing this.” Blam! Instant feedback. Somehow that just seems incredibly exciting to me.
So I used to worry that I’d waited too long. No more. This is only the beginning. It’s only going to get better.